Gordon Cheung: Here Be Dragons – John-Paul Stonard
Published in Gordon Cheung's solo show catalogue, “Gordon Cheung: Here Be
Dragons”, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries, UK, 2016
Here Be Dragons and Here Be Dragons II are no ordinary flower paintings. First, the
method of construction. Sculpted filigree petals and stems combined with soft,
seductive foliage melting into a misty background. The flowers seem to be derived
from still life painting from the Dutch Golden Age — Balthasar van der Ast, or Roelant
Savery, perhaps. Dragons skirt around a Chinese vase of a type that Savery or van
der Ast might well have painted; exotic wares imported by the Dutch East India
Company at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century.
But things soon turn more sinister. Beneath the vases topographical shapes refer to
contested territories in the South China Seas, and in turn to China's controversial
economic expansion and political dominance in the region. Through the hazy
background can be seen newspaper stock listings, those mind-numbing pages. The
Dutch East India Company, it might be recalled, was the first multinational, and the
first company to issue stock. The whole is bathed in a strange artificial light; a harsh
backlight could be blazing sunlight or a nuclear flare.
Like much of Gordon Cheung's work Here be Dragons reflects on the difficult
relationship between east and west, and in particular the rise of China as the
apotheosis of capitalism, in a world for decades dominated by the United States.
Grand themes indeed, delivered in a high-apocalyptic register. Cheung's
imagination works on the level of civilisations but never loses sight of the individual.
At stake also are the difficulties of creating a bridge between eastern and western
artistic traditions. Take landscape painting, for example. The earliest surviving Chinese
landscape paintings are from the tenth century, made during the T'ang Dynasty.
Painted in ink on silk, these imaginary landscapes appear flattened, unreal, but
based on close observation of nature. There is no linear perspective, or narrative, or
composition in the Western sense of picturesque framing devices. Distance is shown
by planes receding into mist. Where Western landscapes are horizontal, Chinese
landscape painting is often vertical, showing the distinction between mountains and
water. The Chinese name for landscape painting is simply Shan-shui, or 'mountainwater' picture.
For all these reasons Chinese painting has not always been understood in the West. It
seems so remote, so different to western traditions that we might feel we are dealing
with an entirely different concept of art. It has been suggested (Hegel did) that the
intricacies of Chinese painting are examples of the sublime, and it is true that the
opposition between man and nature is a strong feature of Chinese art and poetry. In
the late T'ang period nature provided a refuge for painters and poets alike from
turbulent times. Is this then a point of contact, the sublime being the key concept in
a tradition of European landscape painting that arose in the eighteenth century? To
a certain extent, we might say — yet nature in Chinese painting is never imbued with
the same sense of overwhelming threat, or indifference to human life — it is always
contained within the bounds of human imagination.
Cheung collides the scale and emotional energy of the sublime with an eastern view
of the natural world. A Thousand Plateaus stitches together a number of details from
Chinese paintings, separating them with a numinous glowing mist, the whole
superimposed on the stock listings that form the ground for much of his work. Instead
of a Buddhist temple nestling in the misty crags, however, we see nail houses, those
tragic symbols of individual resistance to economic expansion and governmentsponsored development, which have appeared in a number of Cheung's recent
paintings.
In European painting the romantic sublime reflected the experience of being
overwhelmed by nature, by the scale of natural scenery, standing in front of a
ravine, for example, or at the irrepressible force of nature, the drive to survive and to
propagate: the rite of spring. Have we created a new sublime in the digital world of
the Internet? Where does it stand in relation to nature? Can it claim the same level of
complexity and power? Cheung has described it as 'a new virtual world of data that
carves out a new landscape', and as a 'techno-sublime' with the numinous, even
theistic qualities of the romantic sublime. Is there a digital god?
It is the kind of question one might find in a science fiction novel. Where the golden
visions of a painter such as Turner were derived directly from an experience of
nature, the golden light of Cheung's paintings reminds us more of the dystopic world
of Blade Runner, of a golden sunlight filtered through a post-industrial digital haze: a
raking light that glistens in the foreground of A Thousand Plateaus, a burnished glow
giving a sense of unnatural age.
It is also the gold of sand, the 'lone and level sands', perhaps, that cover the wreck of
a civilisation in Shelley's Ozymandias. Sand is highly charged in Cheung's work, a
material charged with the vast stretches of geological eras, within which the rise and
fall of civilisations are mere pulses in time. In Great Wall of Sand Cheung points to the
land reclamation campaign by the Chinese government in the South China Sea,
conducted by dredging sand onto coral reefs to create artificial islands. A floating
diagram shows indicates the trade routes comprising China's new Silk Road and
Maritime trade routes; it hangs above landscapes taken from a colossal painting
hanging in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, into which Cheung has added a
nail house. Where Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, Cheung sees the fate of
individuals in the face of the great drifts and dunes of civilisation.
Sand appears not only as a real substance in Cheung's painting, mixed with paint to
form a textured impasto, but also in the striated drifts, or 'glitches' that appear on his
versions of Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings, now in the
New York Historical Society, which show the rise and fall of a city, implying that it was
destruction was due to the trappings of civilisation and wealth, overlaying a more
benign pre-lapsarian 'Arcadian or Pastoral' state. Cheung's versions use a digital
process of 'glitching', or Pixel sorting (an open source application for digital
manipulation) that he describes as an 'algorithmic version of Richter's blur' to interfere
with the images, creating sandlike drifts. They symbolise, for Cheung, the 'repetition
of history re-ordered into the digital and modern age'. As a pioneer of the use of
Internet imagery in painting, Cheung's painting opens a window onto the digital
space of the Internet.
Cheung takes the pixel sorting technique into a further dimension with his digital films,
based on images of paintings from seventeenth-century Holland, as well as
propaganda posters for Mao. Cheung explains his use of old master paintings as a
response to the increasing number of museums willing to release online high
resolution image of collection paintings. Almost imperceptibly the images transform
into gradations of 'pixel-sorted' colour, a strangely grotesque vision of abstraction, as
if the image were buried beneath a sand dune. The paint is not only de-mixed,
separated pigment from oil, but the oil and minerals returned to the ground,
paradoxically abstracted in the process.
I asked Cheung if he felt his art was more European or Chinese. His Chinese ancestry
has meant he has never felt entirely British, where in Hong Kong, he tells me, he is
hardly seen as Chinese, paradoxically belonging and not to both cultures — an
important and positive situation, in his eyes. Hanging between these two cultures,
halfway down the Silk Road, perhaps, the virtual world provides an in-between
space — a world of digital images and exchange that recognizes no borders, unless
of course it comes up against government censorship. All art, it might be said, is
made from a sense of not quite being in the right place, of being displaced. In this
situation the digital world becomes a potent source and workshop for images. In
Cheung's case it is a workshop on the end and ends of civilisations.
But there is more profound, more historical shift, beyond that of artists to the online
world, one in which power is moving back to older regions, from West to East, along
the old Silk Roads. Central Asia, once the source of the Tulips that became so
valuable in seventeenth century Holland, is now the source of oil and gas reserves, as
well as other natural resources that are the basis of vast new wealth and power in
the region. In its 'One Belt, One Road' plan, China is bidding to become the tollgate
for a new Silk Road, and a maritime Silk Road that will bypass the unstable regions of
Central Asia — the 'One Road One Belt' scheme that Cheung shows in Great Wall of
Sand. Where once on the global map Europe stood at the centre, between the old
and new worlds, it now finds itself at the western fringe, a peninsular on the Eurasian
landmass.
These vast economic and geo-political realities are not easy to encapsulate in works
of art, and this is not Cheung's purpose. It is rather, through subtle combinations of
imagery, to ask questions and provoke thought. Evoking Tulip mania, alongside the
'Great Wall of Sand' scheme to reclaim territory as a form of economic expansion,
raises the question of how a Chinese tulip speculation bubble might appear, and the
axiom that there has never been a boom without bust. How will the transition of
China to authoritarian capitalism affect our vision of the world in the twenty-first
century? Just as the first works of cubism in the years before the First World War seem
now a premonition of the century to come, so now it is only in works of art that we
might get some sense of our shared future.
And only with the new and often startling techniques derived from the digital world
can we begin to imagine what brave new image world might arise from this new
interconnectedness, and shift of power from west to east. 'Here be Dragons' is also
used by computer programmers to indicate complex parts of a code, a sort of dark
and mysterious area where reality might easily slide into myth. These are the areas
Cheung's paintings and films inhabit: here indeed be dragons.